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June 30, 2017

Darwin is not in Wilber's camp

[PDF] CLIMBING THE STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

F Visser

The phrase "creative advance into novelty" is from process philosopher Whitehead, and is often used by Wilber to refer to this mysterious question of how on earth anything new could possible have arisen. However, postulating "novelty" as a cosmic principle that cannot be explained any further hardly does anything more than begging the questions we have about nature. Science, in contrast, tries to unravel the mechanism behind seemingly mysterious natural phenomena, and books progress every day. It is an anti-science and anti-discovery stance to postulate a cosmic driving force such as Wilber's Eros, to throw light on these phenomena.

It is not just that Wilber has meditated a lot and prefers to speak about these extraordinary experiences using some mystical poetry. No, he often uses these notions deliberately and specifically to "explain" natural phenomena—without ever specifying the details, of course. [...]

Darwin's invocation of love has absolutely nothing to do with Wilber's ontological positioning of it in his Integral theory. It is sexual selection and survival of individuals within a nested network (family, friends, tribes) that is the real focus and prime mover behind why love arises in the first place. Contrary to Wilber presupposition, Darwin is not "reifying" love nor equating it in any way with Integral theory's notion of Eros. Using Wilber and Loye's own questionable methodology underlines this very point since the word sex appears nearly twenty times more than the word love in the The Descent of Man.

Is word count really an insightful way to truly understand a theory? I think not, particularly when such word choices invariably come embedded within an informing and necessary context. Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf, for instance, to take just one stark example mentions the word love in some form over 40 times.… Darwin is not in Wilber's camp, no matter how one tries to wiggle him into fit an "Integral" paradigm entrenched as it is with a directional aim for evolution.

Wild fluctuations come from the fact (uncertainty pr) that delta(t) and delta(x) are extremely small at the beginning of the universe. Our universe is supposed to have started in an extremely small patch of vacuum. Indeed, we have to postulate a very strong field, the so called Inflaton which is believed to be responsible for this very rapid exponential expansion. These quantum fields were present in the original vacuum. The quantum field theory for this is on good ground.

Kashyap Vasavada on June 30, 2017 wrote: Nevertheless it is absolutely necessary to have quantum fields in the primordial vacuum and wild fluctuations. So, in this sense, something did not come out of nothing!!

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[S.P.] For anything to exist, there must be a concrete place, or a volume of space, where it exists. In the beginning there was no space, no vacuum, therefore nothing could be said to exist in the beginning. However, if we start from presuming the existence of "quantum fields in the primordial vacuum and wild fluctuations", then it is the same as to assert that a tree has evolved from a seed -- an enough trivial statement.

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[Kashyap Vasavada] wrote: Question of ontology should be left to philosophers. ... Speculations on ontology does not help that much in doing physics,

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[S.P.] Then the "Big-Bang theory" and "Multiverse theory" should be treated as philosophic theories which bear no relation to Physics. I agree. I would also add that Physics should also stop trying to account for consciousness, since it is not its subject matter -- it is a subject matter for the Science of Consciousness as a new scientific discipline.

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Best,

Serge Patlavskiy

June 30, 2017

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[Eric Reyes] wrote: I think the exact opposite is true, for what is absolute or whole there is no beginning. If something exists it has always existed.

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[S.P.] What I believe is that Noumenal Reality had no beginning and will have no ending. By "Noumenal Reality" I mean the one which is postulated to exist objectively and independently of what we think about it. However, every living organism has its own version of Phenomenal Reality as a sum of experience (knowledge, information, etc.) about Noumenal Reality, and this sum of experience the organism acquires due to activity of own consciousness in the course of its life. So, the given organism's version of Phenomenal Reality begins right after the moment of insemination, and ends when the organism dies -- it has its beginning and ending.

Second. I like your talking about Reality as a whole. I have even formulated what I call the General Law of Simultaneity, which holds that for (Noumenal) Reality to exist as a single whole, all the events and processes that belong to it, if they do take place, they must necessarily take place simultaneously, and this fact does not depend on a physical frame of reference we choose within our Reality, nor on a distance between these events and processes. (For details, see my reply to Jonathan Edwards on May 30, 2017).

Study of consciousness should be segregated into at least three different sectors:

1. One's professional life involves a set of skills and values. Those have a bearing on one's conception of consciousness. Those engaged in science are the most affected.

2. As social beings, a practical level of understanding of consciousness is assumed. It needn't interfere with 1. and 3.

3. At the purely personal level, the responsibility of finding what is true is paramount and should be pursued disregarding 1. and 2. Many feel they can search for the truth on their own but tell things that are imperfectly plagiarised versions of earlier propositions.

A main problem in this Forum is people generally conflate the three whereas distinct routes can lead to more honest discoveries.

Guy Kahane, “Our Cosmic Insignificance, 761. Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd,” in Mortal Questions (Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 11. Ibid., 12. Ibid. Kurt Baier advances a similar argument. He says that if life “can be worthwhile at all, then it can be so even though it be short. And if it is not worthwhile at all, ...

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